The question with security audits is always, how far do we go? What third party software should and shouldn't we audit?

For an application that uses Drupal, it's pretty clear that we should audit the custom configuration and code as well as verify that all third party library versions used do not contain known vulnerabilities. But should we audit Drupal? Should we audit a popular third party module like Views? How about a less popular one like the Feeds REGEX Parser? What if a Alpha, Beta or Devel version is used?

I'm sitting at the conference dinner, in the cargo room of the Cap San Diego in Hamburg Germany, supposedly the 'largest cargo ship seaworthy museum in the world'. Across from me is a German student and OWASP volunteer. We've been talking for a while now, he looks forward to a future in pentesting so he volunteered to help with OWASP AppSec Research 2013. AppSec is a conference for Application Security, hosted by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). Sometimes they add 'Research' to it to encourage researchers to come and speak.

'Sigh. Here we go again' I think as I hear conversation around us stop, people listening in.

Introduction

On 24 and 25 January it was time again for PHPBenelux the 5th version no less. Two days full of PHP talks that started Friday morning with tutorials. My choice of tutorial was “Design patterns workshop” by Brandon Savage.

What started as a dream for a worldwide library of sorts, has transformed into not only a global repository of knowledge but also the most popular and widely deployed Application Platform: the World Wide Web.
The poster child for Agile, it was not developed as a whole by a single entity, but rather grew as servers and clients expanded it's capabilities. Standards grew along with them.

Because HTTP is an extensible protocol browsers have pioneered some useful headers to prevent or increase the difficulty of exploiting these vulnerabilities. Knowing what they are and when to apply them can help you increase the security of your system.

In the opening to this series, we discussed what ETags are and demonstrated their most common use case, caching. This time around, we’ll look at a lesser known but perhaps even better feature of ETags: keeping changes safe when writing to the server.

These last few years have seen the rise of some amazing frameworks oriented towards Single Page Application (SPA) like ExtJS, AngularJS, Backbone, Ember, etc. Following the trend where Front-end and Back-end separate. Client side technologies are now being managed by one team and Back-end services by another. This Separation of Concerns is wonderful for implementors as you only need a specification of the API and you can develop functionality concurrently. However all this client-side functionality often leaves the question: How are we going to secure the API if, at least in theory, it should be open for the browser of any device anywhere on earth? (no, we do not support the ISS).

Yet, ETags are one of the features that are the hardest to get right. Sometimes it’s not even clear how they work and while there’s a lot out there on the subject, it can also be difficult to put it all together. Developers frequently play either client and server roles in this exchange, which can make the responsibilities even more confusing.

In this series of blog posts, we’re going to look at ETags from both perspectives: First, a client trying to consume an ETag-enabled API. By focusing on the client side, we can focus on the features ETags offer and learn how these are supposed to look in a perfectly implemented world. In a later post, we’ll look at the gory details of how that API implements ETags and does the appropriate checks.

Likewise if a software project is delivered and no one has looked at security, can it be said to be secure?
If a tree falls... by Dunc(an) When a customer commissions Ibuildings for a new application, he usually has plenty of functional demands (I need it to do X and also Y and Z... oh and can I get A?). And maybe some thoughts have been given to performance metrics, but security? Well... it "needs to be secure".

In July 2011 Nitobi (now acquired by Adobe) released a stable version of a small library called PhoneGap. It's main purpose was to close the gap between web- and native applications. This was achieved by wrapping web applications in a native app for each supported platform. Another feature to close the gap is to expose Javascript API's for functionality which is otherwise only available to native applications.

Episode: 2012 - 10 Sam de Freyssinet
Business owners have woken up to the reality that the web is increasingly consumed on the move. Product owners are demanding new mobile sites that must be released yesterday! You manage an established online business, now you need to move into the mobile market. How do you take your existing business into a mobile domain? Does the entirety of your current business model need to exist in the mobile environment? Or is there a killer mobile app hidden within your existing product? This talk will walk through ten considerations that you must make when moving your online business to a mobile audience.

Episode: 2012 - 12 Ibon Tolosana
CocoonJS is a native wrapper for HTML5 canvas based applications/games.Without any code changes and thanks to its OpenGL canvas bindings CocoonJS is able to execute you applications with almost a 1000% performance boost.CocoonJS offers native iOS and Android deployment environment. It is highly focused on monetization since applications deployed in CocoonJS have out-of-the-box Ad networks and tracking systems integration. Other features like asynchronous websockets, localStorage, facebook integration, etc. are available too. All this magic is achieved directly, without cross-compilation processes or being limited to custom APIs.

The web as a mobile platform

The web has been a great place on desktops and laptops for quite some time, but with a booming growth of mobile devices like tablets and smartphones, the internet has become increasingly more interesting on these devices as well. Building mobile apps for the web has some advantages when compared to native development, before we start with Sencha Touch 2 we will take a look at these advantages.

Episode: 2012 – 09Estelle Weyl
Mobile browser performance is challenged by bandwidth, battery, and memory constraints. Slow loading and reacting sites create bad user experiences. Sites that drain batteries or crash the browser are infuriating. Porting a web application designed and developed for desktop devices—devices with virtually unlimited memory, and literally unlimited power (they’re plugged in, not running on battery) in many cases just doesn’t work. By understanding mobile limitations and keeping mobile in mind throughout the development process you can create more responsive, faster downloading, less battery consuming applications.

Episode:2012 - 01Pratik Patel
You've got a great idea for a mobile app. You have a team together. You're building the killer app. Do you know enough about the various app stores to know what to do next? How about pricing strategies for iOS and Android? Have you thought about the Nook Color and Amazon Fire? In this session, I'll bring my experience as CTO of TripLingo, an Atlanta company developing foreign language learning apps. TripLingo has been featured on the iOS store a dozen times, as well as the Android market and Nook store.

Episode: 2012 - 04 Ariya Hidayat
GPU acceleration on mobile browsers, if it is leveraged correctly, can lead to a smooth and fluid applications, thus improving the user experience. There has been a lot of mentions and best practices of hardware acceleration these days, although so far it has been pretty general and hasn’t provided much technical direction apart from simple magical advice such as “use translate3d”. This talk sheds some more light on browser interactions with the GPU and explain what happens behind the scenes, covering the topic of acceleration of primitive drawing, the use of tiled backing store, and composited layer. Knowing the actual machinery behind hardware acceleration, you will be in the position to plan your strategy to improve the performance of your web application.

Ten years ago JavaScript was considered a toy, then the XMLHttpRequest object was discovered, then came the JIT engines, making JavaScript fast, now with new specifications (ES5, ES6, ES7) coming out and more libraries than you can shake a stick at JavaScript is as big an envinronment as any server-side language.

For the morning of tutorial day, I chose to attend Think like an ant, distribute the workload, given by Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson. Helgi is a former Ibuildings colleague and now a bigshot at Orchestra.io. I'm happy to see he's doing well. His presentation started off explaining to us why distributing can be a good thing by pointing out three significant aspects: budget, efficiency and perception.